The contrast between two recent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns – one in Barcelona, Spain, the other in Portland, Oregon –
shows why constantly keeping the focus on Palestine is necessary for
activists working to end their communities’ investments in Israel’s
human rights abuses.

The city council of Barcelona voted in April this year to “condemn the Israeli occupation and policies of colonization of Palestinian territories,” capping
a three-year-long campaign that also resulted in nearly 70 other local
authorities in Spain and its autonomous regions declaring themselves
“apartheid-free zones.” A key aim of the Barcelona campaign was to
ensure that city procurement policies reject contracts with any
corporations profiting from Israel’s settlement activities or other
abuses of Palestinian rights.

These municipalities and a few others elsewhere in Europe, such as cities in the United Kingdom and France, set a new standard for the international Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

Similar efforts are underway in the United States, focusing on bringing
human rights investment or procurement screens to municipalities. These
screens can then be used to raise awareness of Israel’s violations of
Palestinian rights, with the aim of divestment or bans on procurement
contracts with corporations profiting from Israel’s settlements and
other war crimes.

If these campaigns become a trend, what implications could they have for the future of the BDS movement?

City governments are at the forefront of resistance to the domestic agenda of President Donald Trump.
Several major cities and dozens of others have declared themselves
sanctuaries for all immigrants, even at the risk of losing federal
funds.

Seattle, Washington, and Davis and Santa Monica, California, responded
to Trump’s green light for the Dakota Access Pipeline by taking steps to
cut all business and investment ties with Wells Fargo, a major financer of the pipeline planned to run through Standing Rock Sioux land and the Missouri River, the tribe’s natural water supply. The city of Portland recently suspended all investments in corporate securities in response to several divestment campaigns, including a campaign to end investments in Caterpillar due to its role in the Israeli occupation.

Political consensus before economic pressure

Boycott, divestment and sanctions are tactics to apply economic pressure
on Israel, urging consumers not to buy Israeli and settlement goods and
encouraging corporations to end their complicity with Israeli apartheid. The BDS movement is modeled after the campaign that helped end white minority rule in South Africa.

During the South African anti-apartheid campaign, what came first was
not economic pressure but a political understanding and consensus behind
the need for economic pressure. An overwhelming international political
consensus eventually led to the economic sanctions that helped topple
the apartheid regime.

The Palestinian-led BDS movement faces a challenge its South African
counterpart did not: the formidable grip of the Israel lobby on the US
Congress and the Democratic and Republican parties. Palestinians are up
against not just an Israeli occupation but a joint US-Israeli occupation
financed and maintained by the US government.

A recent Brookings Institute poll showed
that 60 percent of Democrats “supported imposing some economic
sanctions or taking more serious action” in response to Israel’s
settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights, built in violation of international law. A May 2017 poll conducted
by Nielsen Scarborough confirmed the Brookings survey, finding 56
percent of Democrats supported economic sanctions. A Gallup poll in
2014 found that
a majority of young people, aged 18-29, and a plurality of women and
people of color disapproved of Israel’s bombing of Gaza that year,
agreeing that Israel’s actions were “unjustified.”

Even in traditionally Republican states, urban areas are overwhelmingly Democratic,
populated by workers and communities of color – those most likely to
sympathize with the Palestinian struggle. As a result, campaigns
targeting city governments could be national in scope, carrying the
potential to further widen the growing split over Palestine in the
Democratic Party.

Progressive Except for Palestine

One of the chief impediments to the BDS movement, however, is the
failure of liberals to champion Palestinian rights. The paradigm is
known as Progressive Except for Palestine (PEP), though the phrase is
inaccurate. It applies a label of “progressivism” to a phenomenon that
actually reflects national chauvinism, anti-Arab racism, selective
application of human rights standards and ultimately a defense of an
ethno-nationalist ideology – political Zionism.

This type of alleged “progressivism” is merely a liberal cover for
maintaining the status quo of oppression, exploitation and
discrimination.

City divestment campaigns have the potential to break the paradigm known
as PEP. Local government is at the center of many progressive
struggles, ranging from housing and homelessness to police brutality,
immigrant rights and environmental concerns.

By joining these progressive forces, BDS activists have an opportunity
to educate about Palestine and explain why local and state tax dollars
should not be invested in corporations complicit in human rights
violations, climate change, mass incarceration and other key social
problems. This intersectionality recognizes that what appear to be
single-issue struggles are united by a common enemy: a political
economic system that places corporate profits above human rights and
needs.
But what does it mean to raise Palestine in an intersectional way with
other groups that are largely fighting around domestic issues?

When a corporation like Caterpillar’s equipment is used to demolish
homes in Palestine and build Israel’s apartheid wall and its
settlements, an obvious symbolic unity is apparent with Caterpillar’s
role as Trump’s handpicked contractor for the border wall with Mexico and with the use of its bulldozers to destroy sacred siteson Standing Rock Sioux tribal land while building the Dakota Access Pipeline.
While Palestinians were trying to block Caterpillar bulldozers from
destroying homes, Sioux activists were chaining themselves to
Caterpillar earth excavators to protect their water and land.

For this type of intersectionality to occur, however, boycott,
divestment and sanctions activists need to totally break with PEPism.
Just as racism permeates our cultural, social and economic structures,
making it difficult for anyone to escape its influence, the pervasive
PEP paradigm invariably infiltrates our thinking, even unconsciously.
PEPism is yet another form of chauvinism.

Palestine takes a back seat

The PEP paradigm was a point of contention during the divestment
campaign in Portland, Oregon, in which this writer was involved. It is
an example BDS activists should learn from.

An example of how PEPism unconsciously crept into strategic decisions
regarding the campaign occurred when one organizer suggested that
because Palestine is “controversial,” it might be necessary for
“Palestine to take a back seat” during efforts to forge intersectional
alliances.
During a national conference call of BDS campaigners, one participant
even suggested that working with strategic allies might mean not
mentioning Palestine at all. As the campaign approached the final vote
with the city council, one supporter recommended, “Let’s not bring up
Israel.” And a national Palestine solidarity campaign advisor suggested
that Palestine should be “de-centered” in final presentations to the
council.

In the event, that did not happen, particularly because religious groups
within the coalition kept Palestinian rights front and center.
Nevertheless, the campaign failed to persuade a single council member to
speak out openly against violations of Palestinian rights.

One councilor rejected the opposition’s characterization of Jewish Voice for Peace, part of the Occupation-Free Portland coalition, as “fringe Jews” and remarked that
the group just wants “to make Israel a better country.” Otherwise,
councilors failed to make a single public statement in relation to
Caterpillar’s role in violating Palestinian rights while coming to a
decision to stop investing in corporate securities.

Palestine must be a key issue in the wider struggle against human rights
abuses. Discrediting the PEP paradigm is the first step to building
solidarity with the Palestinian civil society call for BDS.

This task takes on added urgency as Zionist groups identify intersectional solidarity efforts as a primary challenge to defending Israel’s “legitimacy.” BDS
activists engaged in alliance building will undoubtedly begin to
encounter Israel apologists deliberately working in alliances that touch
on environmental, immigration and indigenous rights issues in order to
ensure that solidarity with Palestine is absent and Israeli apartheid
doesn’t get mentioned at all.

The Portland city council decision to stop investing in corporate
securities reflects the importance of alliance building on a principled
basis. Several campaigns came together, including longstanding efforts
to get the city to divest from fossil fuel companies, from Wells Fargo
and other banks financing the private prison industry, from Wells Fargo
and Caterpillar for financing and building the Dakota Access Pipeline,
and the Occupation-Free Portland campaign to divest from Caterpillar for
its role in the Israeli occupation.

In terms of political significance what transpired in Portland was a
partial victory compared to what happened in Barcelona. It was a partial
victory because one of the campaign’s goals was to get the city to stop
investing in Caterpillar, and in that it succeeded. The campaign
brought so much community pressure that the city council could not
ignore it and had to respond in some way. It opted to get out of all
corporate securities.

The council itself failed to issue an unequivocal vote against the
Israeli occupation, like that made in Barcelona. But popular pressure in
Portland was clearly in support of Palestinian rights, and Palestine
solidarity activists need to keep up this pressure until the PEP bubble
bursts.

Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is active with the Occupation-Free Portland campaign.